Scheduling of a mixed batch/continuous sugar milling plant using Petri nets

Scheduling of processes in mixed batch/continuous plants, due to their hybrid nature, can become very complex. This paper presents the Timed Hybrid Petri net (THPN) as a suitable tool for modelling and scheduling of hybrid systems. One of the major benefits over traditional methods is a significant reduction in complexity during problem formulation. A sugar milling plant containing both batch and continuous processing units is used to illustrate the application of the proposed scheduling algorithm.